Want2retire: “Your premise is, essentially, if it has not been reported it does not exist. So much for gray area. Black and white. It is or isn’t.”
When someone says, “Here is a company that is producing a super-strong silk with many of the performance characteristics of spider silk, what is the first application you think of?
Parachutes? Medical applications? Bullet-resistant materials for the military? Women’s luxury silk evening gowns? Pima cotton/silk blends?
If you answer “Pima cotton/silk blends,” I’d say you were nuts.
Did Polartec ask for Pima cotton/silk blends? I doubt that. The DoD isn’t a big fan of cotton because it absorbs sweat and gets heavy. Oddly enough, KBLB put out a PR asking, “Who in the US wants Pima cotton/silk blends?” That PR alone suggests to me that such blends are not the #1 application the market wants from KBLB.
That was my point. You said nothing to convince me that there is a huge demand for cotton/DS blends that trumps all of the other potential applications for DS.
Want2retire: “Another layer of your premise continues to seem to be that, though long sought by many, we can’t be sure there will be any interest in spider silk based products.”
Well, that is a big misunderstanding on your part. What I said is that KBLB’s success in the market depends on many factors, not simply the fact that they are making DS.
“The military SPECIFICALLY mentions spider silk but you still aren’t sure there are any takers out there?”
There is at least one company out there making spider silk from goo. This is more like spider silk than the chimeric silk DS is. No, I’m not talking about Spiber. I’m talking about the company the Air Force awarded a contract to for the production of spider silk. It wasn’t KBLB. I’d never even heard of the company and can’t remember the name, but it was shared on this board.
Again, you are ignoring my argument. It doesn’t matter if you are the only one making DS and can crank that out by the metric ton. What matters is whether or not DS is something that people want and will pay for and can’t get anything like it anywhere else for less money.
Right now, we only have evidence that Kings has stood up and said, “We want $40 million worth.” Three years ago.
When contracts are announced, we will know a heck of a lot more about who wants DS and how much of it they want. That is quite important information to have in any estimate of the future value of KBLB. Assuming KBLB ramps up production, we shouldn’t have to wait much longer. Perhaps within the next three months.
And I hope that KBLB doesn’t say, “We have to make $40 million worth of Pima cotton/DS blend before anyone else gets any DS.” I’m not convinced that is where the big market demand is.
AI
